The Cave Of The Covenanters

I've told you about the 17th century murder of Archbishop Sharp in the woods to the south of the village before, complete with a show-and-tell of the monument, and the grave-site of the Covenanters who, although not the murderers themselves, were the convenient scapegoats. What I haven't told you about is for what these Covenanters were actually fighting...

To quote Wikipedia: “The Covenanters are so named because in a series of bands or covenants they bound to preserve themselves to Presbyterian doctrine and policy as the sole form of religion of their country." Basically they were fighting the 16th and 17th century fight of John Calvin's Reformation (the Scots Protestant church being influenced by Calvin rather than Luther) against Roman Catholicism. Of course, it's much, MUCH more complex than that (hence the link) but as I've been throwing the Covenanters' name around a little, I thought it was time to throw an equally small amount of light on the subject. 

But why now, I hear you whine ask? Well, not long after I came back here I invested in a Ordnance Survey map of the area. As you do. Well, no, actually, I lie. I bought it after my first Epic Walk was established, having previously printed off an incredibly old (which I didn't know was ancient at the time) copy of a rambler's map that covered the village, and Blebo, and finding it strangely lacking. No sh*t. Opening the up-to-date OS map was a revelation, and not just because I found a marking for a Covenanter's Cave further to the west:

A little light reading on the subject told me that this cave was where the real murderers of Archbishop Sharp flew after the deed was done. Halfway up a cliff, apparently.

And as a macabre and not-really-relevant side-note, the member of the clergy who presided over the funeral service of the archbishop in St Andrews, a Bishop Paterson, is infamously remembered by posterity by being the inventor of thumb-screws. Yup.

But I digress.

Off I went, in the direction of Blebo Craigs, then continued further on west instead of turning north to Flisk. It's so pretty around here - tiny old villages and hamlets, quiet single-lane back roads, and rolling countryside (that can't possibly be captured well on a phone camera whose panoramic function is questionable at best)...

Yes, you'll note the presence of square bales. But from this distance you can't tell that these are MOFO bales: enormous and well beyond the humphing-about capabilities of kids who want to make a fort. For shame, farmers. FOR SHAME! Won't anyone think of the children????

But yes, it's very pretty around here, and I think I've found a potential new favourite tree. (What do you mean, that's not a thing?) She's a beauty, and so graceful!

And just down the bottom of this road is the dead-end. For cars, that is... because here we meet the legend that is Jenny's Steps.

Take a look at the OS map again. See the name ‘Kemback'? Look just under the final k and you'll see two squares to indicate buildings, and immediately under that is the right angle of a triangle. Look at the contour lines. Yup. Jenny's Steps and the pathway leading to it (marked by the horizontal part of the triangle) goes straight downhill, although the ancient-walled-surrounded right-of-way (to the left of the field below) starts gently enough, it's true.

But then you meet the real incline.

Toto, we're not in Holland any more.

But that's not really the end of the steepness, as the gradient stays pretty much the same all the way down to the Ceres Burn, even when you hit the road again, but luckily for me this time I could stop halfway down and turn off to search for the trail leading to the cave, as oof, my knees were starting to complain once I started walking downhill on tarmac again! (Perversely they were fine on the steps. I'd say age is catching-up with me, but it's more likely that my knees were just wanting to mess with my head...)

I found a trail. It was very pretty, then very steep, then very untrail-like the further up and around the hill I went, with no sign of a cave, or even cliff, to be found. It was then that I realised that the cave was on the other side of the hill - the cliff side, duh - and potentially to be found off the other track. Hey, I never claimed I was an expert map-reader, and anyway, take a look as the OS again - the marking is bang-slap in the middle of both trails (she says, possibly protestething too much...). As it was getting late I decided to leave it for another day, primarily because I suspect I would have ended up just wandering through the darkening woods thinking I was on a track, and ending up somewhere near Perth.

Still, on my failed trail I found a delightfully old and tiny bridge which spanned a wee burn that burbled on down the hill.

And I did manage to climb my way back up to the beginning of Jenny's Steps, though by the other side of the right-angle of the triangle, up the rocky path by the side of the woods, overlooking another stunning vista.

At the top of the track I turned north-east again (the hypotenuse, just to keep the triangle analogy going), and wandered through the woods, thoroughly enjoying the feeling of being under thick tree cover again,

revelling in the leafy tracks that tunnelled through the trees,

and delighting at the beginnings of a little huttenbos (dutch for wood hut) - little bit of ‘home' at home! :)

In A Bit Of A P̶i̶c̶k̶l̶e̶ Jam

Facebook memories, or ‘On This Day', or whatever it's called, has been rolled out to nearly everyone I know there except me, it seems. No, well, I tell a lie. I had it for one day, then after 24 hours was primly told that I was yet again amongst the undeserving. 

Sorry, this feature isn't available

Nicola, thanks for coming to see your memories. Currently, this feature isn't available to everyone.

Pff. Not that I believe most of my memories are worthy of another trawl through the timeline, but it would be nice not to be the only one of my friends who doesn't even have the chance to annoy everyone with something that happened on this day, eleven years ago. Just as an example...

But I can make a blog post. If I had a white cat sitting on my lap just now, I would be stroking it, and chuckling in a menacing manner!

For you see, eleven years ago today I fell down some worn and uneven steps outside a Portuguese church and broke my foot. It's a long story involving a too-long dress, too-high heels, and the heady feeling of pride that comes after singing a really good concert, followed rapidly by a tumble down a dozen or so ancient steps in front of the entire audience who had only just vacated the venue before me.

Anyway, I'm digressing slightly, because this post will actually be about sweet tomato jam, and not my phenomenal powers of being able to embarrass myself so proficiently in front of others...

Wait! There's a link! Honest!  The connection between this and my unenviable gift of self-mortification is that whilst staying in Portugal for rehearsals I came across the most wondrous taste explosion that is tomato jam. (It's a tenuous link, sure, but it's a link none-the-less!) It was unlike any other jam I had tasted (and I have tasted many, as my mother is a jam- and jelly-making machine). But tomato? My northern tomatoes-are-exotic-and-grown-in-greenhouses-and-not-to-be-wasted-en-masse mind was blown. Or at least blown until my foot threw a spanner in the old memory-making apparatus making all flashbacks pertaining to the trip centre on excruciating pain, and not exceedingly good jam. 

The anniversary of Tumble-Gate coincided neatly with a rather effusive ripening of tomatoes of all shapes and sizes in Dad's greenhouse. On the whole we're not a huge eaters of tomatoes. We'll crunch through them in salads, fry the odd few with Sunday breakfast, and my Dad is rather fond of red onion and tomato sarnies, but we'll usually use up what becomes ripe before it becomes the dreaded no-longer-ripe. Faced with a couple of kilos of ruby beauties all ready to be picked at once and not knowing what to do with them is when my memory kicked in, by-passed the foot fiasco, and settled squarely on breakfast in Portugal: toast, and tomato jam.

Sweet Tomato Jam with Honey and Vanilla from NY Times Cooking

Needless to say, I don't have the actual Portuguese recipe, but this was the only sweet tomato jam recipe I could find online (there are many chutneys and savoury recipes to be found, though), and luckily the sweet version tastes just as I remember it! 

You need:

1360g (3lbs) tomatoes (I used a variety of... um, varieties.)

240 ml honey

300g granulated sugar

2 vanilla pods (split)

½ tsp lemon zest (although I just used the whole lemon. Who only uses that tiny amount???)

2 tbsp lemon juice

pinch of sea salt

½ tsp freshly chopped rosemary (not part of the written recipe, but added because our Portuguese accommodation was surrounded by wild rosemary bushes and I find rosemary and tomato a lovely combination at any time!)

The first thing you need to do is blanch the tomatoes. Well, it's not the first thing on the linked recipe, but I find tomato skin to be nasty in home-made soups and presumed it would be nasty to find in jams!

Firstly I cut little crosses into the bottom of the tomatoes to make the skins a little easier to remove after their water torture.

Then, in batches, I added tomatoes to boiling water for thirty to sixty seconds, then plunged them into ice-cold water for thirty seconds, and the skins were easy-peasy to peel off.

I'm not saying it wasn't messy, because it was, but still a lot easier than trying out non-existent mad knife skillz attempting to skin the poor wee things cold. Unless, of course, you have actual Mad Knife Skillz™, then please, have at it!

Oh, and don't forget to prepare your jam-jars by washing them in hot soapy water, rinsing them well, then placing them in a decently hot oven (around 100C I reckon) to dry completely. Having hot jars ready for the jam also means that there is less chance of a jar exploding when decanting the hot stuff. Double whammy - scalding hot jam, and sharp shards of glass. Heat your jars, people!!

The next part is truly easy, just time-consuming, as all you need to do it add everything to a decent-sized pot and simmer-boil away until that time when a wrinkle test gives you a positive result. I was stirring for about an hour until I saw the light and added the rest of the lemon juice to help thicken it to a decent consistency, but YYMV!

Once wrinkly jam has been attained, take out the vanilla pods, and ladle the good stuff carefully into the prepared jars, add the papers and other jam-making paraphernalia, and leave to cool. Or, alternatively, burn your the roof of your mouth on a fresh spoonful because the smell was too intoxicating not to have a taste right then and there.

10/10 Would burn again.

A Murder Over The Bale Forts

A tale of  treachery in rural Scotland.

Or, yannow, just a good Autumn walk amongst the freshly-harvested fields, watching crows fly on the wind.

There's something about the smell of freshly cut wheat and barley stalks that takes me right back to harvest time when I was wee, in those long-ago days of rectangular hay-bales. We'd pile these building-block bales on top of each other to make high and unsteady walls, create entrances that were scarily prone to collapse just as you were crawling in (‘lintel' not yet earning a place in our vocabularies), and a look-out was always stationed close-by in case the farmer noticed a pack of semi-feral bairns climbing over their livestock's winter fodder!

I took a walk (Epic Walk No. 1 direction) one blustery afternoon in early September to find that not only had the fields been harvested, but all signs of wavey, wheatey life had been removed. Barring the odd forgotten stalk here and there...

The difference in outlook is always remarkable after fields have been harvested. The soft-focus lush and overgrown green pathways bordered by whispering fields of gold that speak of late Summer, turn into the pale beiges of tall grass cut to sunless levels, and the harsher bronzes of stubble and earth.

This change also means that I get to see the countryside in its new state for the first time in a decade or two...

I remember walking through Sorghvliet Park for the first time in full Summer, after first acquainting myself with those Dutch woods in their denuded Autumn form, and finding myself lost on more than one occasion because I literally couldn't see the trees for the forest, as it were. All my points of reference - tall and stark oak over here, magnificent beech reaching for the sky over there - were obscured by the grand foliage explosion of Summer, and I wandered in circles for want of a leaf-free vista more times than I'll admit to...

This time the experience was reversed. Suddenly being able to see more on the horizon, being able to see more detail, and unobscured potential landmarks led to a confusion of too much information!

After walking up Clatto Hill, through Blebo, and round by Flisk, I decided to take a walk through one of the shorn fields in the direction of a (to my eyes) picturesque group of trees away in the distance. So I climbed the gate (something the larger me of yesteryear would not have contemplated, never mind actually managed) and crunched my way through the stubble only to realise that this group of trees was the same group that I saw whilst walking in the other direction, further to the south. I somehow didn't recognise this from when the pathways were full of tall grass and surrounded by swathes of wheat and barley, but that little copse of trees in the photo above, looking East, is the same little group of trees to the left-hand side of the second photo, looking West, and I could have walked straight on past the green field of sheep to the edge of the field to join up with the pathway and head home the same way I arrived, had I decided on taking the short-cut!

I didn't, of course, or I would have cut out half an hour's walk, so instead I retraced my steps back to the gate, and carried on down the track to the road, then headed back up to eventually reach the village again (hills. Lots of hills) by way of a photo opportunity over the River Eden, Tay Estuary and the distant hills to the north.

I have to say, though, that although those roly-poly bales may be more convenient to collect and store, their fort-building properties are decidedly lacking...